By Abdi Karim
Many Kenyans are wondering why veteran radio personality, Leonard Mambo Mbotela is going to be buried at Lang’ata cemetery this Saturday.
Those asking think Lenny, as was fondly known by his contemporaries think he should have been buried at his ancestral home.
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However, not every Kenyan can say that he comes from village X or Y and that’s where he will be buried.
The ancestral home concept doesn’t exist in Lenny’s case.
If you want Lenny to be buried at his ancestral home that would mean flying his body to the Village of Mpanda on the shores of Lake Malawi in Malawi.
Lenny was not an indigenous scion of the Coast as the Mijikenda Swahili, among others.
He is from Yao ethnic group and a descendant of a freed slave, Mzee Mbotela.
Mbotela the father was rescued from an Arab slaves dhow heading to Arabia where he was to be sold in some slave market in the 1860s.
The freed Mbotela married a fellow Malawian she met at the Freretown free settlement.Her name was Ida Halima from Kamtunda clan in the village of Mpanda, Malawi.
The two had a son Juma Mbotela who later married a freed slave from Seychelles, Grace David.
David was the Sultan of Zanzibar slave in the early 1900s.
This was Lenny’s grandfather from the son of Juma and Grace, James Mbotela.
If you watched the “Roots”, this is the Kenyan version.
A settlement was established in 1864 in Mombasa called Freretown that became home to hundreds of freed slaves mainly from Malawi (Wanyasa) and India (Bombay Africans).
The tribes here were numerous including Oromo from Ethiopian, Seychelloise and Malagasy.
Some were settled at Rabai.
Some runway slaves established several independent maroon villages in Kilifi and Lamu counties.
They had fled from Arab owned plantations.
Mbotela’s ancestor wrote a captivating memoir “The Freeing of the Slaves” or “Uhuru wa Watumwa” back in the late 1950s.
“Therefore, Mbotela family are an urbanite Kenyan family and most of his relatives are buried in the public cemetery at Freretown Mombasa.”
–Abdi Karim
This is where many of the ex-slaves and their church leaders were laid to rest.
The community is similar to the Creoles in Freetown Sierra Leone and Monrovia Liberia.
Christianised Urbanite Africans’ lives are intertwined with the history of St Emmanuel Church which was built by the freed African slaves from India (Bombay Africans).
To most of them the concept of mashamba na maprot maguta maguta is not deep rooted.
It is the family’s decision to have the legend buried at Langata.
It is our duty to respect that decision.
Kenyans assume we are all the same but believe me _kuna wengine hata ID kupata ni shida.
An example is the Wanyasa (Malawians) of Freretown who are yet to be recognised as a Kenyan tribe.
At least Lenny was a celebrity- he could make ways.
Some are forced to adopt Mijikenda names just to get an ID.
We recently had the Nubians (Sudan), Shona (Zimbabweans), Makonde (Mozambicans) and Pembas (Tanzanians) recognised as Kenyan tribes.
History class dismissed!
But before I dissappear, Mbotela Estate in Eastlands Nairobi is not named after Leonard.
It is named after his uncle Councillor Tom Mbotela who was assassinated during Mau Mau.
And by the way this may shock you- slavery was abolished in Kenya in 1907, and by 1950s there were still ex-slaves in Mombasa, Lamu and Malindi living with their former masters.
Farewell Lenny, son of Freetown.
Farewell legend!
You were always excited to hear stories of my experiences as a war correspondent whenever we met.-
The author is a journalist, popularly known as Yassin Juma, who knew the late Mbotela closely. This is an edited version of his writeup shared on social media platforms._
